his poor boy, the
shelter he scorns for his own bare head; who learns to feel and to pray
for the miserable and houseless poor, to discern the falseness of
flattery and the brutality of authority, and to pierce below the
differences of rank and raiment to the common humanity beneath; whose
sight is so purged by scalding tears that it sees at last how power and
place and all things in the world are vanity except love; who tastes in
his last hours the extremes both of love's rapture and of its agony, but
could never, if he lived on or lived again, care a jot for aught
beside--there is no figure, surely, in the world of poetry at once so
grand, so pathetic, and so beautiful as his. Well, but Lear owes the
whole of this to those sufferings which made us doubt whether life were
not simply evil, and men like the flies which wanton boys torture for
their sport. Should we not be at least as near the truth if we called
this poem _The Redemption of King Lear_, and declared that the business
of 'the gods' with him was neither to torment him, nor to teach him a
'noble anger,' but to lead him to attain through apparently hopeless
failure the very end and aim of life? One can believe that Shakespeare
had been tempted at times to feel misanthropy and despair, but it is
quite impossible that he can have been mastered by such feelings at the
time when he produced this conception.

To dwell on the stages of this process of purification (the word is
Professor Dowden's) is impossible here; and there are scenes, such as
that of the meeting of Lear and Cordelia, which it seems almost a
profanity to touch.[159] But I will refer to two scenes which may remind
us more in detail of some of the points just mentioned. The third and
fourth scenes of Act III. present one of those contrasts which speak as
eloquently even as Shakespeare's words, and which were made possible in
his theatre by the absence of scenery and the consequent absence of
intervals between the scenes. First, in a scene of twenty-three lines,
mostly in prose, Gloster is shown, telling his son Edmund how Goneril
and Regan have forbidden him on pain of death to succour the houseless
King; how a secret letter has reached him, announcing the arrival of a
French force; and how, whatever the consequences may be, he is
determined to relieve his old master. Edmund, left alone, soliloquises
in words which seem to freeze one's blood:

This courtesy, forbid thee, shall the duke
I